When Monk got around to taping the tune in 1954, he called it “Hackensack” in honor of what was then the site of Rudy Van Gelder’s New Jersey recording studio. Monk insisted that he was the source of another riff that Williams employed in her 1944 recording of “Lady Be Good” with Coleman Hawkins, and which Hawkins would record as “Rifftide” a few months later. “Rhythm-a-ning,” a variant of “I Got Rhythm,” took part of its melody from an ensemble figure Williams employed in her 1936 arrangement of “Walking and Swinging” for the Andy Kirk band.
Two other originals were written on familiar harmonies and reflected Monk’s longstanding friendship with Mary Lou Williams. Each piece received definitive treatment from the quartet, as did the more recent and haunting tribute to Monk’s wife, “Crepuscule with Nellie.” “Eronel,” Monk’s refinement of a line created by trumpeter Idrees Sulieman and pianist Sadik Hakim, was another uncommon harmonic sequence with a feeling closer to bebop.
“Think of One,” while appearing more straightforward, is an object lesson in creating rhythmic intensity with a minimum of melody. “Criss Cross is a purely instrumental conception – it is not a tune – it is a composition for instruments.” – Gunther Schuller, Jazz Review
#Thelonious monk discography series#
Gunther Schuller was so impressed with “Criss Cross” that he made it the basis for a series of Third Stream variations featuring Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and Bill Evans. Chief among these was the title track, with its complex rhythmic shifts and unusual six-bar bridge. One feature of the album was the revisiting of compositions little heard since Monk introduced them on Blue Note and Prestige in the early ‘50s. With performance opportunities increasing, and the wider dissemination of his music that followed his signing with Columbia Records in 1962, Monk found himself able to mold an ensemble that could deliver the lean, infectious, inquisitive readings his compositions invited. Two months later, the former ne-plus ultra of jazz complexity found his portrait on the cover of Time Magazine, where reporter Barry Farrell declared, “Monk has arrived at the summit of serious recognition he deserved all along.” The story emphasized that Monk was both emerging in mainstream America and rapidly establishing himself as an international touring attraction, as audiences at home and abroad received the pianist and his band warmly for its perfectly lucid and unfailingly swinging presentation of one of jazz’s greatest repertoires. Thelonious Monk had jump-started his 1964 annual cycle of recordings with a Decemconcert at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall that presented his music solo, in its most familiar quartet format, and via a recreation of his 1959 Town Hall Orchestra.
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